Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing by Stormie Omartian Page B

unchallenged.
    When she was 11, Virginia had an unpleasant encounter with her mother, who was nine months pregnant at the time. Apparently her mother verbally rebuked her for something she had done. Virginia insisted that she was being unjustly accused, stomped her feet, and talked back saying, “You’re wrong! I didn’t do it!” She was sent to her room, where she silently wished her mother dead. A few hours later her mother went into labor, and at the hospital she died in childbirth along with the baby. As children frequently do, Virginia felt responsible for what happened and believed her mother’s death was both a punishment and a rejection of her. Uncensored guilt and unbearable grief led to deep emotional scarring from which she never recovered.
    The shock of the death overwhelmed Virginia’s father, and the burden of caring for his three daughters was more than he could handle. The girls were separated and passed around among different relatives and friends. Because of that, Virginia felt isolated and alone. This was during the Depression, and having an extra child to feed and clothe was not always considered a blessing. Virginia believed that the various foster parents she stayed with favored their natural children over her in affection and material goods. Whether true or not, she believed it, and the perceived injustice instilled her with anger and bitterness.
    She became attached to one certain family in which the other young girls were attractive and possessed qualities that she greatly desired. Virginia tried to emulate them and did her best to make the whole family like her. But just as she was allowing herself to have strong feelings for each member, the father of that family killed himself. No one knew the reason for the suicide, but Virginia once again assumed that it was because of her. “I’m responsible for all the deaths in my family,” Mother had once told me gravely. I now understood why she thought that way.
    Gradually it became too hard for Virginia to cope with the real world. She believed she was responsible for the deaths of two of the most important people in her life, and because she was at an age where she was unable to understand or verbalize her feelings, rejection took root. With everyone around her forced to deal with serious problems of their own, there was no one to help her. So she invented a world she could deal with and understand, where she was the center. In her creation she did no wrong, but was persecuted unjustly. Unable to cope with the mountain of guilt she faced daily, in the world of her own making she was blameless.
    During her late teenage years, Virginia contracted a severe case of scarlet fever and came close to death. When she recovered, certain family members observed that she was never quite the same. Her emotional instability became more apparent and her already changeable personality exhibited hot and cold mood swings that defied logic. She tried desperately to get out of the small town where she lived and attend college or study music, but there was no money for that, and in addition her father strongly opposed it. This frustration added to her growing bitterness and insecurity.
    As a child my mother had been put in the closet a few times by her father as punishment for minor infractions. Even though those incidents were infrequent and of short duration, she was severely indignant and vocal about her dislike of it. She was jealous of both her sisters and had mentioned to me many times how she felt they had consistently received better treatment. Because of that she was especially cruel to her younger sister, Jean, and put her in a closet a few brief times for punishment.
    After hearing these stories, I began to feel sorry for my mother. She was someone to be pitied instead of hated. She had been trapped by her environment and the circumstances surrounding her life. A stronger person might have worked through the problems, but she survived the only way she knew